- 3 days ago
American racing hero Dan Gurney's exploits in auto racing and car construction are legendary, but Dan was also mad for motorcycles. So much so he built his own feet-forward machine (the Alligator) with a few different production engines modified to his specs. But he also got his company All American Racers to design a compact 1800cc Twin that was projected to make 280 hp with perfect smoothness. Oh, the glory! Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief made many trips to All American Racers to interview Dan and see what was going on over the years, all shared here in this special Cycle World podcast.
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00:00:00Welcome to the Psycho World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron, our technical editor.
00:00:06Today we'll be talking about Dan Gurney.
00:00:10Specifically, Dan Gurney's moment-canceling twin, which we'll talk about what that is.
00:00:19And where it's intended use was.
00:00:24Yep. You know, Dan Gurney, American hero, won Formula One, a Formula One race in a car of his own construction.
00:00:37Bruce McLaren's the only other fellow to do that.
00:00:41Two pretty big names in motorsports. Dan Gurney, the champagne spray shaker guy who was the first guy who did that for that tradition that we all carry on.
00:00:54All-American racers, Santa Ana, California. Dan was a huge motorcycle fan.
00:01:02Was an importer of, what, Montessa's for a little bit.
00:01:06And just always loved riding, but he was also very tall.
00:01:09And he also, so what did he say?
00:01:12He said, I always felt like I was going to tip over forward when he was breaking downhill on a conventional motorcycle.
00:01:16And he rode a chopper, and he did some other stuff, and he was a race car driver.
00:01:22I went to lunch with Dan Gurney many years ago, and he had a Toyota Sienna minivan, part of his GTP effort, where they made 1,100 horsepower through, what did he call it, the hummingbird sphincter?
00:01:35Because they kept putting a bigger restrictor plate on his GTP car.
00:01:40And he and his engineer, well, I'm sure Drino Miller was the principal guy responsible for that.
00:01:47But they were able to continue just smashing the race wins with that car, and kept doing it through a smaller and smaller restrictor.
00:01:57But Dan Gurney in a Sienna, I was dying, because I got to ride shotgun as we went to lunch, and his seat was incredibly reclined.
00:02:09Like, it was, like, flat.
00:02:12And I was like, Dan, what is that?
00:02:13And he's like, oh, you just get used to it after a while, you know, because all his Formula One cars and race cars were all like that.
00:02:19And that's how he drove his Sienna to that Mexican place they always went to.
00:02:24So that was remarkable.
00:02:27That was for a different story.
00:02:28It was Gurney's Hallway.
00:02:29It was adjacent to some other stuff about the Alligator.
00:02:33And the A1 Alligator was a proof of concept that they did way back in the day with a Honda XL350 single.
00:02:41And then by the time there was something for sale, it was called the A6.
00:02:47And it had a 708cc single-cylinder Honda engine.
00:02:52It was a Honda XR650L engine that had been given the full Gurney treatment.
00:02:59And I have never ridden a single that runs like that.
00:03:02I rode an earlier version that had that, I believe, with a carburetor.
00:03:07The fuel was behind you and the engine, it's recumbent.
00:03:12So you're sitting in between the engine, which is right in front of your face, kind of.
00:03:16And then you have a backrest.
00:03:18And there it was.
00:03:19And it had a shield over a trumpet intake, like an aluminum shield with a little frame.
00:03:27And it was just open in the air.
00:03:28So this thing is just megaphone-ing in your face.
00:03:32It was an intense experience.
00:03:35And it was one of the more prototype-y ones that had, you know, tubular frame and all that.
00:03:40By the time we did a road test, it had twin trumpet fuel injection.
00:03:48And it had an airbox cover that went over it.
00:03:51It was still fabulously loud.
00:03:53It had an under-seat muffler, sort of under the chassis, a la Buell and many manufacturers now, with barely any muffling.
00:04:02And it dynoed it to 65 horsepower.
00:04:06It 0-30'd in 1.1 seconds because it was so long.
00:04:10You could just, you know, Don Canade did the testing, 0-30 in 1.1, 0-60 in 3.1.
00:04:17And, you know, super bikes could do 0-60 in 3.1, but they were doing it with 150 horsepower and then struggling, you know, like you have to be so careful to get something that tall off the line versus this thing, which you just, it was like a dragster.
00:04:33Amazing impression with that single cylinder.
00:04:37It was about $35,500 for the ones he was making at that time.
00:04:43But he always wanted more.
00:04:47He always wanted more than just...
00:04:49Well, it's Southern California, isn't it?
00:04:51Yeah, than a ripping, than a ripping 708cc, big bore, high revving, single, beautiful broad power.
00:05:01Let us note also that Chuck Palmgren, who was a national level racer and a tuner, had worked for Dan forever.
00:05:10And on the motorcycle projects, Chuck was always involved.
00:05:16Yep.
00:05:17So tell us about Dan's desire for more, Kevin.
00:05:20Well, you work on this concept.
00:05:26You've got this motorcycle, which naturally has a longish wheelbase, and you don't want it to get so long that you can't go around a corner.
00:05:37You can't change direction quickly because the front wheel allows you to move the lever, which is the wheelbase, to steer the rear wheel.
00:05:49The longer that lever is, the smaller the angle through which an inch of displacement at the front will steer the rear wheel.
00:06:00So long chassis are associated with turning that takes a long time.
00:06:08And, for example, when Cook Nelson described his bevel drive Ducati on which he won the 1976 Daytona Superbike racer, was it 77?
00:06:26He said it steers like it's on rails.
00:06:40Locomotives are on rails and they don't steer at all.
00:06:44So it's hard to understand this, but that thing had a 60-inch wheelbase.
00:06:49So this is a problem.
00:06:52You need the length to have a feet-first motorcycle, but you want to get rid of the length.
00:06:58You want to compress the length in the interest of high turning performance.
00:07:04Well, the single-cylinder engine looked like the optimum solution because it's only one cylinder long or one crankshaft long.
00:07:14So eventually he decided, okay, I'm going to put a big V-twin in this thing and I'm going to see how that goes.
00:07:23So 120-inch S&S motor with either gurney heads or reworked S&S heads and making some good power and with rubber mounting.
00:07:40And I believe billet cases and it vibrated.
00:07:50Well, let us pause for a moment to say that if there was any company that you wanted to work on the breathing of an internal combustion engine, it would be Dan Gurney's All-American Racers.
00:08:02Back to Westlake heads, all of that stuff, all of that attention to flow, all of Dan Gurney's inventiveness, the gurney flap.
00:08:12There's a famous picture of him in the All-American Racer shop at the drill press where he's pulling down the drill press arm.
00:08:20And he has a bathroom scale and a spring and they're pulling it down and measuring, you know, how many pounds per inch.
00:08:30Spring rate.
00:08:30Yep.
00:08:30Spring rate, right?
00:08:31We all use the drill press that way.
00:08:33That's how you do it.
00:08:34Well, it's funny that Justin Gurney, his son, who's, you know, around my age, and I see him in Southern California at car and motorcycle events.
00:08:44Um, we own Dan's old XR 1200 X, uh, as a, as a family.
00:08:50And so I, we talk about that and so forth, but he recently posted, someone posted that photo of Dan at the drill press and like, Oh, that's dangerous.
00:08:57He's going to put his eye out or whatever.
00:08:58And, and, uh, Justin's response was, well, he, he raced a magnesium car surrounded by gasoline with no seatbelt at the Nürburgring.
00:09:10And he's not really worried about the spring, the spring and the drill press.
00:09:15I was dying.
00:09:17And it's, uh, it's very true in any case.
00:09:20Yes.
00:09:21If too much is just enough, everything is justified.
00:09:24Yeah.
00:09:25You would, if you wanted a car with efficient cylinder heads and good breathing, no matter what constraints you might have, whether it's two valve or it's a GTP car that's breathing through an orifice.
00:09:36That's this big and making a thousand horsepower, all American races where he was, where you'd want it.
00:09:42Like, I wish that they had done engine modifications on this XR 1200 X, like, Oh, let's just kiss the heads a little bit and do a little, you know, just to get a taste of that magic.
00:09:51Uh, airflow would have been king over there.
00:09:54Well, uh, I saw that bike at the, at the quail motorcycle gathering one year.
00:10:04It was parked out front of the, uh, hotel where, um, we were lodged.
00:10:11And Dan wasn't around later.
00:10:15I asked him about the bike.
00:10:17I, I'd seen it there with that big old V twin.
00:10:21And he said, it vibrates.
00:10:24And he said, what I always have to say about vibration is that it fatigues parts until they break and fall off.
00:10:38So this way he was able to get around all of that talk about vibration is good for you, man up and live it up.
00:10:49Um, and there are countless examples of motorcycles that vibrated and whose parts fatigued and fell off in 1953.
00:11:04NSU decided to rejoin international road racing, um, with a transverse in line four and, um, rotor.
00:11:17The designer gave it separate cylinders and heads so that everything had these loose fitting couplings, the camshafts and so forth.
00:11:27And all the, how many vibratory modes did it have with cylinders doing this and back and forth?
00:11:35Well, it froth the fuels and fuel in the float bowls so that it wouldn't carbureate and parts broke off.
00:11:43Kawasaki, for the first two years of their tandem twin, which is two cylinders, one ahead of each other with counter, counter rotating geared together crankshafts.
00:11:56They decided they would have one piston up when the other one was down.
00:12:01It seems intuitively no worse than a parallel twin, which does the same, but a parallel twin not only vibrates, but breaks parts, engine mounts specifically.
00:12:14Well, on the KR, it broke the exhaust pipe, it fixed it so that sometimes when you went for the lever, if the little parts inside the check valve was vibrating in a certain direction, you pulled the lever, it just came smoothly to the bar as you whizzed past your brake marker.
00:12:32We had an MV Augusta with Nissan brakes that did that.
00:12:35Yeah.
00:12:36Yeah, we did that.
00:12:37It was years and years ago, 20 years ago.
00:12:41I was doing it at Willow where the lever would start to come back and you'd have to pump it back up.
00:12:46And then we ran it on the dyno and that engine vibration caused that same scenario.
00:12:52And when Kenny Roberts' team built their three-cylinder 500, the first version had no counter balancing shaft.
00:13:05Later version, I think the second version and third, Mr. Oguma, retired from Honda, sort of came by and said, here, let me fix that for you.
00:13:18Because it did things like break off the rear subframe and all kinds of other stuff that just gave up under all that fatigue.
00:13:30So when I talked to him about that V-twin powered bike, he said, I'm going to have to fix this.
00:13:39And he said, can I call you up?
00:13:42Let's talk about this.
00:13:44So I thought, well, okay, yeah, I'd love to.
00:13:49And of course, the kinship was that although I'm supposedly a journalist, I don't write about the excitement.
00:13:59I'm not excited about the excitement.
00:14:01I'm excited about what happened.
00:14:04And I think Dan had to be a pretty practical person to achieve the success that he had in racing.
00:14:12So anyway, at one point, I'm wandering around in this huge building where the SAE is having an annual meeting, the Kobo Hall or someplace.
00:14:25And there's Dan Gurney.
00:14:29Oh, he said, just a guy I wanted to talk to.
00:14:31Here, let's pop into this classroom.
00:14:33So we go, he said, we can sit down.
00:14:35So we go in and sit down and we're talking about different stuff.
00:14:40The door opens.
00:14:40Somebody looks in.
00:14:41Oh, oh, I'm sorry.
00:14:43Closes the door, goes away.
00:14:45He instantly, obviously, recognized, there's Dan Gurney in there.
00:14:50You can't go in.
00:14:51He's talking about stuff.
00:14:52And two or three more people stuck their heads in the door before we both realized they want this classroom for a scheduled meeting.
00:15:05So we went to the door and said, well, we'll vacate.
00:15:10Now you can move ahead with your program.
00:15:13But that just shows that crowd, Society of Automotive Engineers, attendees, all recognized Dan by sight, didn't need any introduction.
00:15:31So he was interested in this idea of the counter-rotating crankshafts.
00:15:39And the cool thing about it, Kawasaki corrected the original design, which Mr. Sato had drawn, thinking that this motion was no worse than a parallel twin.
00:15:52Because parallel twins are usually 180 degree firing two strokes.
00:15:57And what they did was they added a counterweight to each crankshaft that was equal to all of the reciprocating weight on one assembly.
00:16:15Now, if you see that the two pistons are at top, then they phased them to move the pistons simultaneously.
00:16:24With two pistons at top center, the two counterweights are at bottom center, and they're pulling down as hard as the pistons are pulling up.
00:16:33So that's canceled.
00:16:34Then at the 90-270 position, the pistons are in mid-stroke, so they're exerting hardly any force on anything, because they're neither accelerating nor decelerating.
00:16:51And the two counterweights are either this way or this way, and they cancel each other.
00:17:00So all the way through the cycle, it's self-balancing.
00:17:08And this shouldn't be too surprising, considering that a BMW Boxer twin basically does the same thing with the cylinder axes 90 degrees apart on a single crankshaft.
00:17:23So I thought this was a great idea for a big twin, because the thing that Ducati achieved in 1972 when Paul Smart won the Imola 200 was they showed that a big twin,
00:17:40which is normally associated with heavy vibration, parts fatigue, and pieces falling off, could be made to have zero primary shaking force.
00:17:53Well, there are the three, four ways to do this.
00:18:00There's the Dan Gurney way, which was Kawasaki's second try, and it worked.
00:18:06There's the Max Freeze way.
00:18:08He designed the original Boxer twin for BMW, but he was an aircraft guy, so he couldn't design an engine that would shake its way out of a wooden,
00:18:19a fabric-covered wooden airplane, and the 90-degree system that Ducati adopted for the bevel twin,
00:18:36and Honda's system of staggered crank pins, which allows you to use cylinder angles in between those extremes.
00:18:49Unfortunately, well, for example, one engine that used this system was the RS750, the dirt tracker that Honda built,
00:18:57which succeeded in dominating AMA flat track for a period of time.
00:19:03And nobody expected a Japanese company to come and want them to do that and succeed in doing it.
00:19:15But that was the balancing system that they used because they couldn't use a 90-degree engine because it was too long.
00:19:23So, dirt tracker, look at the pinnacle of dirt track design, which for years and years was the KR750 Harley.
00:19:35And it's like you put the engine on a stand and rolled the front and rear wheels up until they almost touched the engine and said,
00:19:42make a bracket, make a bracket that'll hold all this stuff together, as short as it could be.
00:19:50So, this was a good solution for Dan's project because although it would add the length of another cylinder,
00:20:00which would, okay, could be a problem,
00:20:03he also designed the gearbox and clutch to be really compactly back against this thing.
00:20:10So, it wasn't like the oyster shell assembly method that you'd see on a CB750.
00:20:20You open it up and there's a kickstart, output shaft, input shaft, and crankshaft.
00:20:25The thing is long.
00:20:26So, this looked like a really good engine for his project.
00:20:35Unfortunately, we get old and die and that's what Dan did.
00:20:41And all these plans were made, all this testing and so forth.
00:20:47They did a lot of computer simulation work.
00:20:52Ducati began to adopt computer simulations for the intake process and combustion around the year 2000.
00:21:06This kind of thing can be highly effective.
00:21:10And of course, at the time, we were eager to see this thing run.
00:21:17Now, to my knowledge, it has not done so and there are no plans that it should.
00:21:23I think it did.
00:21:25Did it?
00:21:26Yeah, we weren't there for it.
00:21:28Chuck showed me the cylinder head.
00:21:29So, Chuck Pongren was, you know, the main guy working on it.
00:21:32What I loved about our visit is I said, you know, the claimed horsepower was like 200 and do you remember what it was?
00:21:42Very high.
00:21:42Oh, like 270, something like that.
00:21:44Yeah, I mean, just remarkable power for a displacement.
00:21:48And what was cool about that, I was like, well, Dan, you know, like what's driving this?
00:21:56He's like, well, it's one more chance to make an impression.
00:21:58I'm like, as if you need to make an impression, Dan Gurney.
00:22:01But that's the racer, right?
00:22:02Like he just wants to keep going.
00:22:07So, I did it.
00:22:09Well, Chuck showed me the cylinder heads on the flow bench, right?
00:22:12We went in and it wasn't just any flow bench.
00:22:15This was all American racers flow bench.
00:22:17It was made and it's on the wall and it's got the tubes.
00:22:21And then showing off as only a cylinder head guy could, he just stood back and he turned the vacuum on and it was loud as hell.
00:22:30And then he, you know, he showed half inch lift and the cubic feet per minute was like off the charts.
00:22:35It was beautiful, like how much that thing would flow.
00:22:38He just smiled satisfactorily and pretty amazing.
00:22:45Yes.
00:22:45Well, at the same time, I mean, Mark and I have visited there and been welcomed and entertained.
00:23:00So, Dan was approachable.
00:23:04One day, Steve Whitelock, who at the time was mechanic for Yvonne de Hamel's H2R 750 Kawasaki Air Cooled Triple, two stroke.
00:23:16And Kawasaki had the stock brake discs were stainless steel, seven millimeters thick, seven pounds apiece.
00:23:31And he was sort of bothered with this.
00:23:36And he'd seen some Indy cars that had holes drilled in the discs.
00:23:41So, he hies it over to All-American Racers and says to the guys, look, here's a problem.
00:23:50These discs are so heavy.
00:23:51Oh, give me that.
00:23:54The fellows go in the shop.
00:23:55They work out a hole pattern.
00:23:57And they're drilling holes in this seven millimeters thick stainless, which is horrible, squeaky stuff that if you let the tool get dull, the drill, you're not going anywhere.
00:24:12All the effort from the drill motor is making smoke.
00:24:17So, you have to keep a sharp tool if you're working stainless.
00:24:19And people saw those holy discs on Yvonne's bike and they had to have them.
00:24:29It was, for a period, a national craze for people riding sporty motorbikes in the early 70s.
00:24:38And that was just a casual spark that flew off of All-American Racers because somebody presented an interesting problem.
00:24:49It wasn't, get lost, kid, we're doing work here.
00:24:55This is a business.
00:24:57We have races to win.
00:24:59No, come on in.
00:25:00Let's look at it.
00:25:02So, this to me is All-Americans because informality has been the American way.
00:25:13And when I think of All-American, also, I think of Dan Gurney and partner winning the 24 Hours Dumont on the GT40 Mark IV, which is the 427 powered Ford GT40 racing sports car.
00:25:38And I remember reading that it was hot in the prototype.
00:25:45So, they said, just there's air conditioning kits over there.
00:25:49Let's put one on.
00:25:51Now, people drove the, there was a Maserati that had a big inch engine, sports racing Maserati.
00:25:59And it just cooked drivers, right and left, the American way, put air conditioning in that race car.
00:26:10And why not?
00:26:12With a seven liter engine, you have to be able to afford a few horsepower to keep the driver alert.
00:26:21And not pulling into the paddock, into the pits every other lap to be basted so that he would cook to a nice brown.
00:26:33So, that is the kind of solution that I think of as classically American.
00:26:42Of course, the car was built by, what, Ford Special Vehicles in England.
00:26:48And the 427 was a truck motor that had been converted for American drag racing.
00:26:58But wonderful stuff.
00:27:01You put the big old iron motor in this racy sports car and win the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
00:27:06And Dan had accomplishments like that, one after another.
00:27:14But he retained this interest in motorcycles and the alligator program went forward steadily because he never, he never abandoned it.
00:27:31So, that, that's okay with me.
00:27:36Um, he also rode fair distances on alligators.
00:27:41I went to, uh, the Yamaha party that they used to hold at Laguna in the, um, aquarium.
00:27:48And, uh, here comes a whole bunch of alligators with Dan at the head.
00:27:58And they get off and come in and they had just blown in from, uh, Costa Mesa, is it?
00:28:08Yeah.
00:28:09Well, that's Santa Ana.
00:28:10Santa Ana, yeah.
00:28:11And they were riding alligators as a way to get somewhere.
00:28:17I realized something, though, when I, when I looked at the, the model of alligator that they called, he called the instigator, which was the S&S big inch V-twin.
00:28:32And the chassis on that thing was made out of small diameter tubing welded together in triangulated form that makes any person of my age think of Maserati's type 61 birdcage.
00:28:50Birdcage Maserati, the word birdcage, describing the, the complicated structure of little structural members, little tubes.
00:29:03And I think the engine came out through the bottom on that, but it was all very carefully thought out.
00:29:14So this is being able to turn his enthusiasm like a headlight on whatever project he wanted to go forward at the time.
00:29:28Yeah.
00:29:29And we know, uh, you know, there was never intent to race this.
00:29:32It wanted, he, Dan Gurney wanted something that at his height, he could feel comfortable in and ride with a lot of confidence.
00:29:40And that was where a lot of their development on the alligator chassis was focused was you were feet forward, the engines in front of you, you have a backrest behind you.
00:29:49It was relatively long.
00:29:51The one that we tested was a 60 inch wheelbase as we measured.
00:29:54Um, the interesting thing about the way that it handled was that it had a very fast roll rate because it was squat and you were, I don't think the center of gravity was particularly different without a rider than a regular motorcycle.
00:30:11We did, you know, they did, you know, they did move the fuel down and certainly the battery had been moved down.
00:30:16But once you put the rider on who's sort of half the, I think the gator we weighed was 340 pounds.
00:30:22So, you know, you, you, you have a significant influence on how the chassis operates.
00:30:27So putting, putting the body on it is going to change that center of gravity.
00:30:31For years, the British, um, maybe it was the journalists, pushed the idea that a low center of gravity was the deciding factor in whether or not a motorcycle handled well.
00:30:49And that has been shown to be false over and over again.
00:30:56People imagined that a motorcycle, here's a wheel, uh, they imagined that a motorcycle on pavement pivoted around its tire contacts.
00:31:10And if that were true, then a low center of gravity would produce a rapid roll rate because what you want is to move all the mass as close to the roll axis as you can.
00:31:28And this is why a twin engine fighter with an engine on either wing in roll is kind of, uh, did you want something?
00:31:36Where a single just goes twink.
00:31:41But in fact, in order to steer a motorcycle, you first have to lean it over and you do that by steering opposite to the corner.
00:31:50So you're steering the wheels out from under the vehicle so that the vehicle is doing this.
00:31:57It's not pivoting around the tire contact, it's pivoting around the roll axis, which is in a conventional motorcycle, something like 21, 22 inches above the pavement.
00:32:09And so dance creation has everything as low as it can be and as close as possible to a roll center.
00:32:26So, and these, these are automobile racers.
00:32:29So they know, they know about locating mass in space.
00:32:35So what you're trying to do is put everything as close to that line as possible.
00:32:40You don't have things sticking out, sticking up away from the roll axis.
00:32:46You have them crunched in tight to the roll axis the best, as best you can.
00:32:52And it was very quick.
00:32:53It was very quick to get to lean.
00:32:56Quick to flick.
00:32:57Quick to flick, and then you had that 60-inch wheelbase, so it wasn't carving, you know, you weren't like in any danger of sort of turning off the inside of the track like you might have been when you first tried a Yamaha R6 with the very steep brake and the short trail and the very lightweight and high revving 600.
00:33:15It wasn't like that, but it handled really well.
00:33:19And it was a pleasure to ride in that sense.
00:33:21You could, you could, you could sort of hang off to really go.
00:33:24There's like famous pictures of Eddie Lawson.
00:33:27Lawson was, you know, part of the, part of the sphere.
00:33:29I think he went on a lot of those legendary Sunday rides where everybody was ripping alligators and speeding past the cops and all that on Ortega Highway.
00:33:41They were just weekly rides.
00:33:42Dan loved it, man.
00:33:43Eddie Lawson's at Willow Springs riding that bike, and he's, he's, I think, dragging a butt cheek, you know, he's just right about there.
00:33:52Because you did, if you slid your butt off the seat, it did make, as you would with any motorcycle, it made it handle, it just shifted, helped you roll in and, and use less lean angle per mile per hour of corner speed.
00:34:05But it worked very well.
00:34:07It was, for what it was, you know, it's, it's not, it's not MotoGP, right?
00:34:12It's not, we're never going to see that work in MotoGP because it doesn't have the weight transfer necessarily that we need to make all the things that need to happen and trail braking and hard braking and all of that.
00:34:24But man, it was quick, zero to 60, the 600, the 700 CC version, zero to 60 was incredibly quick and it was still exceptionally quick in the quarter mile.
00:34:34And the other thing that you got was reduced frontal area.
00:34:38And so that motorcycle top speed testing was either 133 or 135, 135 miles per hour.
00:34:45So on that little motor, very, very, a really, yeah, impressive and a fun bunch of qualities.
00:34:55And of course, the chassis is made out of little tiny tubes, space frame together, you know, because we, they weren't going to, they had a whole composites division.
00:35:06They were making giant wings for droney type stuff.
00:35:10They did all kinds of very interesting projects.
00:35:12That was Apex Space and Defense and they did have an autoclave, which is, you know, a huge oven in which you bake the bagged parts and at a particular temperature to cure the binder, the plastic binder.
00:35:33You know, what Kevin means by bagged parts is that you, you, you put the, uh, the fabric, your carbon fiber fabric, and then you put the resin in that is the glue that holds all that together.
00:35:46And then it's suctioned by this bag that squeezes it to its, you know, beautiful end shape.
00:35:52Because what you don't want is, um, empty places in the thing, in the, um, material.
00:36:01And you don't want, uh, carbon fibers are very stiff.
00:36:06They don't drape well.
00:36:08They don't want to lie down in the mold.
00:36:11Oh, this is so comfortable.
00:36:12Like a cat can get into a box that's smaller than it is.
00:36:16I don't know how they do it, but if carbon fiber would do that, you wouldn't need to bag it.
00:36:22But the bag is there to force it against the mold so that you get the shape that's desired.
00:36:29And they were deep into this aerospace business, um, with this type of, um, autoclave cured.
00:36:38Right.
00:36:39And they had ovens that were a hundred feet.
00:36:43I mean, they had a lot of, they were really, really doing it.
00:36:47They were doing very exotic, very interesting stuff.
00:36:50There was a engine development program that Geno Miller was working on.
00:36:54They were trying to get very high specific horsepower with a, you know, an efficiency target.
00:37:00And, um, that was, it was a fun lunch with him, Dan and Geno.
00:37:06You know, cause this is where you saw, uh, Dan's highly competitive nature and drive come out was, we're at lunch and I'm talking to Geno Miller about, uh, cylinder heads on two strokes.
00:37:19Cause they were using two strokes, uh, potentially to run these engines because of the specific horsepower.
00:37:24But they were trying to squeeze the most out of it per pound.
00:37:27And then how do you get efficiency?
00:37:29And I had been, you know, with Jim fueling and he was showing me his two stroke cylinder heads that he was trying to put on a CR 500.
00:37:36And he had the cylinder head and it had basically like a teardrop combustion chamber.
00:37:43The whole thing was squish.
00:37:45The whole cylinder head, this area of the piston was squish except for the very center.
00:37:50And then it had like a, oh, I don't know, grape shaped little hole, but pointy, you know, almond dish.
00:37:56And then there was a spark plug in this tiny little thing and it was shaped like a rocket nozzle.
00:38:01So they were compressing everything into a tiny kernel right around the spark plug.
00:38:07And I don't know what they were using to fire something like that, but it's harder to make a spark under extremely high pressure.
00:38:13So who knows what was going on there?
00:38:15But, you know, Drino Miller had tried, you know, similar things on that.
00:38:19And we were just talking about it and it was a really engaging conversation.
00:38:22And I said, man, this must be a lot of fun to Drino.
00:38:25And Dan had been sitting there kind of listening and he turns over and he looks at Drino.
00:38:30He said, well, it would be a lot more fun if we were hitting our targets.
00:38:35And I was like, that right there is a champion.
00:38:38That is a good example of a champion with a lot of drive, right?
00:38:44Yep.
00:38:45Well, the idea of a pre-chamber, of course, the orbital two-stroke had a pre-chamber.
00:38:51Ricardo describes a pre-chamber on his E65 test engine.
00:38:59So the concept has been around for some time.
00:39:02Diesels, that's a particular type of pre-chamber that was used at one time.
00:39:09But you have to, in order to try these things, you either have to have the idea originally or know about it or have it somewhere around there so that you can, let's try this.
00:39:23And these things show that these guys were, they read the literature, they had a lot of experience, and they would try things that looked like they could solve the next problem that was holding them back.
00:39:41And, of course, that's the nature of engineering.
00:39:45The way they talk about the development of a motorcycle is as though, well, the engineers are about to do this beautiful work, and they're going to forecast everything mathematically, and it will all come out perfectly.
00:39:59Well, they've got a shipment date for this product, the financial analysts, a.k.a. bean counters, want to hit this date because all the money that's borrowed to tool for a new product has to be paid for in a timely fashion.
00:40:21So, we can't scorn bean counting because it's necessary for these operations to succeed, but what do you do when the problem won't get out of your way, even if you ask nicely?
00:40:37So, the general nature of engineering is a crisis, and you're trying A, trying B, right through to the end of the alphabet sometimes.
00:40:50And it's not always possible to solve the things in the time you have, so you have to take another route to get the result you want.
00:41:01And there are some fascinating development stories of all kinds of equipment, aerospace stuff, internal combustion engines.
00:41:12The latest one to come to come to my attention is what I'm thinking of as the Ducati novel.
00:41:20The big superbike twin started at 115 horsepower and still has under 1,000 cc's, it signed off at essentially 200 horsepower over a period from 1988 to 2000.
00:41:38And one after another crippling problem, we're breaking valves, we're breaking closing levers, we're breaking cylinder liners because it kept pouring the thing out bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.
00:41:55And, well, if it won't, we can't solve that problem that way, we're going to lengthen the stroke so we can leave the bore small for now, because later they're going to make 112 millimeter bore.
00:42:11So, this business of pushing forward through a minefield of problems is the business of engineering.
00:42:26Yeah, and the business of businesses, you do the best you can in the time you have allowed, and then you ship it.
00:42:32Yep.
00:42:32And you go, okay, that's going to pay for itself, it's going to do its, you hope, it's going to do its thing.
00:42:39And we get to begin somewhat anew, like depending on, is it version 1.2 or is it version 2.0?
00:42:47Are we redesigning the cases to accommodate a bore that's fantastically larger than ever conceived?
00:42:54Well, I would love to know where they came up with.
00:42:57Why was it Alcan 143 alloy?
00:43:01Why wasn't it a European alloy?
00:43:03What was special about that Canadian aluminum?
00:43:07Maybe it's just that it was available.
00:43:10The big data centers that are going up in the U.S. now that need lots of electric power,
00:43:17they've got all the gas turbine capacity in the U.S. maxed out,
00:43:24so they're now looking overseas for gas turbines to drive generators to make power for these data centers.
00:43:31You go where the problem leads you.
00:43:34And one of the things that I saw in Dan's office, just sitting on the carpet,
00:43:43was a cylinder off of a Bristol Centaurus.
00:43:46He had a friend who raced Sea Furies in air racing and said it made a nice little sport plane, too.
00:43:56Thousands of horsepower.
00:44:01Oh, gosh, yes.
00:44:03And there was, sitting on the carpet, I doubt too many people who visited there could identify it,
00:44:11but I knew the relationship ahead of time, so there it was.
00:44:16That's weird.
00:44:17Lovely stuff.
00:44:18Because, of course, Dan had friends in all kinds of racing.
00:44:24Yeah.
00:44:26Land, air, and sea.
00:44:32I think the Apex Space and Defense Division has been sold since 2021.
00:44:40But, of course, you had to expect that there would be changes after Dan was gone because, under new management.
00:44:50Well, you have to, that would be a good question.
00:44:53We don't know that or what the specific business is.
00:44:56I know they do stuff for SpaceX.
00:44:58I will say that in many of my conversations with Dan, he credited Justin with saving the company.
00:45:04It's his son, who I mentioned earlier.
00:45:06Yeah.
00:45:06He said, he got him, he got, basically, he said, you know, he did the aerospace stuff and he got the government as a customer.
00:45:16And he said, it turns out the government's a very good customer.
00:45:19Because once you crack the nut, once you're a supplier and you've been vetted and you're producing things that they find useful,
00:45:26that you have a relationship that carries on, it seems.
00:45:31So, what was nice with Dan was that even in his 80s, he was still doing this, you know, as any of us can hope to be interested,
00:45:43also interesting, and that we're off continuing to think about it and try to understand more and solve the problems.
00:45:49There he was.
00:45:50And we went to AAR and we saw drawings.
00:45:53And they were asking us our opinion, which was, I thought, it was incredibly courteous of them, now you think.
00:46:01I mean, I feel like we do have combined between you and I, you know, we have, I have ridden everything.
00:46:08I've raced, I've done, I have an interest in engineering, I am not an engineer, but I'm an engine builder and I've rebuilt transmissions.
00:46:16And, you know, I got feeler gauges and a TIG torch and a mill and I do my best, I always ask myself, who am I if I don't use this?
00:46:25So, if it's time to build the exhaust system for the car or the truck or to mill a tool so that I can fix my hydraulic jack, like, I cannot outsource this.
00:46:35I have the production.
00:46:36If I own it and I don't use it, what does it mean?
00:46:39So, I think I'm vested in all of this, but the fact that Chuck and Dan and other engineers who were involved in this project would invite us there and sit us at the table, tell us about it and say, what do you think?
00:46:53And that they would listen with such respect to people of our background.
00:46:59It was a really wonderful moment.
00:47:01It was always great to visit that shop because of everything that happened there.
00:47:06And at the time that I was there, you know, Remington, the fabricator who had done all that stuff, Phil Remington or Rem as they call him, like, he still had, his workstation existed there.
00:47:21His stuff was still there, his tools, and there was a lot that was in place way back when I was there.
00:47:27He was still alive, in fact.
00:47:30Just wonderful.
00:47:31People were seeing the photographs of the headers on, I believe it was the Formula One car, but they were all, the exhaust primaries were all hand-formed without seams.
00:47:43They were not welded up.
00:47:44Yeah.
00:47:45They were heated and bent, packed with sand.
00:47:49And they were single-piece, and they were amazing.
00:47:52And they were, you know, when you have a V8 of certain timing, if you have a conventional V8, like in an American-style car, the way the timings go, you actually want one of the cylinders in one bank to talk to the other cylinder in the other bank.
00:48:12Otherwise, the timings overlap, and you get, like, you get pressure, pressure, and then you go kick up and up again.
00:48:19And so they, all, yeah, all of that stuff, that's where that great American V8 sound comes from.
00:48:26And then you have the flat crank guys, like Ferrari and stuff, that makes the kind of ripping sound.
00:48:33In any case, those exhaust pipes were like that, and then you had the crossover between the banks, and then it was this fabled hot V.
00:48:41So the stuff was coming up in between the V, the exhausts were coming out the top, because it's a Formula One car, and we're going to, like, let it fly, you know?
00:48:48It's like, we don't have a, we don't need no hoods, you know?
00:48:51Yeah.
00:48:52It was gorgeous.
00:48:53So all of that happening.
00:48:56Anyway, it was to sit with Dan and Chuck and to go through that and to see this thing.
00:49:00And, you know, it's a twin.
00:49:05It was a 5-inch bore, 127 millimeters, and a stroke of 2.8 inches, which was like 70, when I wrote it down here, 71.1.
00:49:17Yeah.
00:49:18And it didn't spin at an astronomically high RPM.
00:49:239,000.
00:49:25Yeah.
00:49:25But it filled the cylinder, and that's where they, the power that they were looking at was about 280 horsepower.
00:49:33And I just try to envision what that would have been like in an alligator that weighed, because it wouldn't have weighed much more than the single-cylinder one would have.
00:49:44It would have weighed probably 25 or 30 pounds more at the most.
00:49:48And you have to bear in mind that any time you do power gearing, there's a possibility that there could be problems.
00:49:55And you might have to do it over again several times until it told you what it wanted.
00:50:02Yeah.
00:50:04For example, the original external flywheel for the FTR 750 was splined, and it wasn't a press fit, so that the rattling caused by the cylinders firing tended to pound.
00:50:25And the thing loose, so that it rattled on the crankshaft.
00:50:30So how are you going to fasten those gears on there?
00:50:34Well, in the case of the Kawasaki, KR250 tandem twin, the two cylinders were one ahead of the other.
00:50:42They were pressed on.
00:50:44And I don't think those pressed on gears came off too easily.
00:50:52But at the design speed of 12,000 RPM, it was roughly a one-foot diameter on those 100-millimeter gears.
00:51:02And so the mesh engaging speed was 12,000 feet per minute, which is right up there.
00:51:11And there would have had to be – those phasing gears would have had to be lubricated by oil jet and not by dipping into an oil level.
00:51:22Because there lies heavy loss from oilage.
00:51:29Yeah.
00:51:30Yeah, we talked about that in another program.
00:51:32But through my deep research into the XS 650, as an owner of the 72 that I had recently revived on, Ranman Parked, a motorcyclist program, I raced Arma last year.
00:51:47And I was like, man, I've got to build a race bike.
00:51:49And I looked at the XS because it's got a pretty good aftermarket.
00:51:53There's many things you can do.
00:51:54But one of the things they do is deep sump.
00:51:58You put a sump on where the screen is.
00:52:00There's a sump plate, and it's a deep sump.
00:52:04And horsepower goes up.
00:52:06Heat goes down because those flywheels are turning in oil in an XS 650 engine, which is fine if you're rattling around back roads and you're kick-starting and riding to the coffee shop.
00:52:17But keeping it ripping, the whole idea of sumps and keep dry sumps or semi-dry sumps, anything that puts that oil away from the crank.
00:52:29Keep the oil away, yes.
00:52:31Because Ducati found that if their riders did a victory wheelie for some distance, the oil system would run dry.
00:52:47So they had to have a sump that was deep enough and shaped in such a way that any likely stable wheelie position would remain oiled up for X minutes.
00:53:02So the lore is that when Harley was replacing the Dyna with the single line, the soft tails, so they were basically bringing the two big twins together.
00:53:13And they settled on a soft tail type design.
00:53:17And they had done a huge rework of their big cruiser is that they got the Dyna bros to come in, the Dyna guys who were like sport stunt wheelie burnouts.
00:53:28And they just put them on the test track and said, hey, have at it, just to make sure that everything would function in this extreme use case.
00:53:36And it did, so it's pretty good.
00:53:41I had a person working at Triumph back in the day when Triumph was coming back in to manufacturing motorcycles and coming into the American market again under John Bloor.
00:53:54And he said, you just can't believe what the end user can break.
00:54:00Yes, so true.
00:54:08Well, one of the things that struck me, I'm looking at the motorcycle, the alligator version that Dan called Instigator, which was the S&S twin powered model.
00:54:19And there's a side view of himself on this motorcycle.
00:54:23And he's got a low seat position of 20 inches.
00:54:26And his feet are forward.
00:54:30And I thought, it's a cruiser.
00:54:33There's the V-twin in betwixt his knees.
00:54:39And it's it was a it's a classic cruiser, except taken to an extreme, extremely low seating position.
00:54:46Nothing to do with sitting on a seat that's above the rear tire.
00:54:50Forget that completely.
00:54:51You're ahead of the rear tire so that your bum can be lowered down.
00:54:58That was one of Steve.
00:54:59Steve Anderson wrote the road test on that alligator that we had tested.
00:55:04And, you know, Steve was editor of Cycle and engineer.
00:55:07He's worked at different manufacturers, interesting, curious person.
00:55:14And he said he was always adamant that there's no such thing as a performance cruiser.
00:55:19And then he tested the alligator and he said, you know what?
00:55:22This is a performance cruiser.
00:55:23Yes.
00:55:24So it's we have a concurrence of thought.
00:55:29Yes.
00:55:31But it was a moment of recognition when I thought this is a cruiser.
00:55:38But that's Dan Gurney there.
00:55:41Yep.
00:55:41Does that work?
00:55:42The moment canceling engine, the name means that when you want to roll, when you want to change direction, that the resistance to roll, the gyro resistance of the two cranks opposite in sign.
00:56:07So that moment, that resistance torque to changing direction is self-canceling.
00:56:16So very quick to change direction, even with this more powerful engine.
00:56:27I wish we could have seen it.
00:56:29Yes, we do wish that.
00:56:35Yeah.
00:56:35I had a conversation with Justin about it a number of years ago, Justin Gurney, and he said he was sort of like, he totally understood why his dad was doing it.
00:56:45But he's like, come on, dad, like, who needs a 300 horsepower motorcycle?
00:56:50And it's like, like, Dan Gurney needs a 300 horsepower motorcycle.
00:56:54That's who.
00:56:55Yeah.
00:56:55Yeah.
00:56:56Because you're always seeking more.
00:57:00Because who's going to get to a point and say, there, that's it.
00:57:04Perfect.
00:57:04Perfect.
00:57:05Needs nothing.
00:57:08No.
00:57:08The thing that happens every year, people and organizations build a race bike for a particular competition.
00:57:19And by the time they get it to the first race, they realize their mistakes.
00:57:24And they realize more during the year.
00:57:28Who designed this thing?
00:57:29It's so, it takes so long to take a, take a part.
00:57:33And this was one of the things during the time that Ducati were having to bring so many engines to the races because they were braking all the time.
00:57:44They got the engine changed down to 20 minutes.
00:57:48That's one way.
00:57:49It's just put in a fresh one.
00:57:52And you can't do that forever.
00:57:56But it might get you through a bad place.
00:57:58Well, it's one of my favorite expressions of yours, Kevin, is 100% doesn't make the grid.
00:58:06You got to show up.
00:58:08It's just when the race starts.
00:58:09That's it.
00:58:10Yes.
00:58:11You could be tired.
00:58:11You know, I was in Barber last year racing Arma and I'm staying in a hotel and, you know, I'm trying to get to bed.
00:58:19I'm trying to do my job.
00:58:20So I'm looking at a computer after being at the track all day and I'm in the hotel and we have a dinner and whatever.
00:58:27Do a little bit of work and it's finally, man, I got to get up and race in the morning.
00:58:30I better get to bed.
00:58:31And you go to bed and the fire alarm goes off.
00:58:34And it's one o'clock in the morning and you're like, oh, and the strobe light is flashing because that's what they do for, if you can't hear the alarm, you got to, there has to be something that's incredibly attention grabbing.
00:58:47And there I was like, I mean, you can't be serious.
00:58:50And then they came on the speaker and said, oh, it's a false alarm.
00:58:53We don't need to evacuate.
00:58:55And we're really sorry.
00:58:56But there I was at, you know, one something in the morning, bright eyed.
00:59:02You just got to show up, man.
00:59:04Everybody's got to be there.
00:59:05That's it.
00:59:07Bike's got to be as good as it is and as do you.
00:59:10Yeah.
00:59:15Well, those things are, that's the way it is with us humans.
00:59:21We can think a lot bigger than we can make always.
00:59:26And so you have to do triage on your ideas.
00:59:35Well, these two ideas are fascinating, but they're too expensive for our organization.
00:59:40That's what Alfred Neubauer, long racing director at Mercedes-Benz said when he went to BRM and saw the supercharged V16.
00:59:54Very nice design.
00:59:56Too bad you don't have the resources to make it win races.
01:00:00And it never did.
01:00:05Yeah, we had a, we, we had a, um, uh, years ago, uh, two owners ago.
01:00:13The magazine was owned by a company that was, uh, being run by a guy who had a personal life coach.
01:00:21And I can't even imagine what a personal life coach does or, uh, how your mindset gets into that position.
01:00:28But he had one and, um, you know, he's a motivational guy and obviously a good salesperson.
01:00:33And I called it the learning to levitate training because, uh, they were going to convince us that we were going to read minds and, and innovate.
01:00:42Think big, bigger than Apple, et cetera.
01:00:44And we were, you know, challenged to think of ways that, you know, the internet could be used and we could do virtual reality.
01:00:52And all these, they were allotting all of these incredible concepts that we were presenting.
01:00:58And I was thinking to myself, I'm down here shoveling coal.
01:01:03And what they want to hear about is solving energy problems.
01:01:08And I was like, well, let's put solar panels on mercury.
01:01:11That'll make some power.
01:01:14Nevermind.
01:01:15You know, all the, you know, you have those ideas, you have the solar panels on mercury, but you also got to shovel coal.
01:01:21You need the power right now, right now, right now.
01:01:24So let's, let's anyways, it was, it reminded me of that, the BRM.
01:01:30Yeah.
01:01:31That's such a beautiful era.
01:01:33If you, if, uh, you have never read about Raymond Mays, um, and Peter Burton.
01:01:39Yep.
01:01:40Uh, yeah, there's, there's a wonderful book called split seconds, which is about the early career of those people.
01:01:50Leading up to the BRM project.
01:01:53And there's also, uh, a book by Tony Rudd.
01:01:58I think it's published by the SAE.
01:02:00And, uh, Tony Rudd was, uh, transferred to BRM.
01:02:08Um, and it was one of those very British situations where, well, what am I supposed to do here?
01:02:13Well, you'll, you'll find a way to fit in.
01:02:16Um, and so he went out and watched the prototype going around corners and the axles are just, the wheels are bouncing.
01:02:26The thing is sliding sideways.
01:02:28And, um, um, the driver has a job.
01:02:32He's not going to say it's junk start over, but that's what they needed to do.
01:02:39They didn't have the time.
01:02:40They didn't have the money.
01:02:41It was a primitive ladder frame, twisty as can be, with this, uh, depending on which version you're thinking of, 500 horsepower, one and a half liter V16 with little, little pistons.
01:02:59And, uh, never won anything because they, like Mr. Noibauer, Herr Noibauer said, uh, they lacked the, the money ever to make it win races.
01:03:12So a measure of realism.
01:03:14This is why race teams have people like Jerry Burgess and Kel Carruthers and Irv Kanemoto and Aroldo Faraci because they know what's practical.
01:03:26They have the experience to be able to say that is a money trap and that is a life trap.
01:03:35You'll spend your life and you won't be able to solve that one.
01:03:39Who was it at Honda?
01:03:41Was it Martin Adams?
01:03:43The engineers handed over.
01:03:46All right.
01:03:46The engineers handed over and we're the farmers.
01:03:48We got to get it done.
01:03:49There's nothing you can do.
01:03:50The weather's coming and we got to get that.
01:03:52Hey, that's it.
01:03:53So that's showing up to the grid and making it work.
01:03:57And that's what he said is that, you know, yeah, we just, uh, we pick up what they give us and some of it's good.
01:04:02Some of it's challenging.
01:04:03We just get to harvest.
01:04:09Well, it was Mathers.
01:04:10It was, it was, um, Mathers who was in charge of racing at American Honda for a long time.
01:04:17Yeah.
01:04:18Who, who made the analogy with the farmer.
01:04:20Yeah.
01:04:21Gary Mathers.
01:04:22Yeah.
01:04:22Do we, do we get a, an engineer?
01:04:26No, because he'll take six months to study the problem and then file a report.
01:04:33How come I didn't get one?
01:04:34You weren't on the list, but it's my problem.
01:04:39No, you get a farmer because the farmer is used to dealing with problems like the aforesaid sky is darkening.
01:04:49The hay has been cut and is lying on the ground.
01:04:52It needs to be bailed and put undercover.
01:04:55However, get that baler working and no offense to the engineers because no, no, they, they definitely have their place.
01:05:05You don't send the farmer to calculate torsional stability of crankshafts.
01:05:11No, because that's how you ended up with farm equipment that weighs tons.
01:05:14Yeah.
01:05:17We're Ford four sixties.
01:05:19Yes.
01:05:20Well, that's it for Dan Gurney's moment canceling twin and the, uh, Gurney alligator and all the other things about, I wish we could talk about that great guy's whole life, but we're here for the two wheel part of it.
01:05:33So that's what we mostly enjoyed.
01:05:36Uh, I hope to honor his legacy by keeping his XR 1200 X in good condition and riding it nearly as fast as he did.
01:05:44And apparently, uh, the Justin say, I can tell you that that motorcycle goes precisely 128 miles per hour.
01:05:55So his Dan's was black and Justin's was white and they used to ride them together.
01:05:59He said he loved it.
01:06:00So it's cool to have a piece of that in some weird way.
01:06:03I also have Dan Gurney's hog card, his Harley owners group.
01:06:06Cause anytime you bought a Harley, you were automatically enrolled and they gave you a card and it says Dan Gurney hog.
01:06:14Phenomenal.
01:06:16Um, anyway, thanks for listening folks.
01:06:18Uh, get down in the comments, tell us what you like, tell us, share some topics.
01:06:23We got topics.
01:06:25We don't hear what you, yeah, absolutely.
01:06:28And, um, yeah, we will catch you next time.
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